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behaviour made for some difficulty in retain-
ing the natural law belief in an essential and
universal human nature. The increasing
sense of absolute cultural difference from the
natives and the impulse to exploit the new-
found lands of America combined, however,
to create propitious circumstances for the ex-
pansion of settlement by Europeans. To the
English philosopher John Locke, writing in
1689 and providing an early example of the
backward-modern conception of the stages of
human social development, the Roman law
known asres nulliusapplied to the ‘empty
lands’ not put to active agricultural use by
the native inhabitants and thus justified their
takeover: ‘America’, he wrote, ‘is still a pattern
of the first Ages inAsiaandEurope, whilst
the Inhabitants were too few for the Country,
and want of People and Money gave Men
no temptation to enlarge their Possessions of
Land, or contest for wider extent of Grounds’
(Locke, 1960 [1689], pp. 357–8; see also
terra nullius).
America waseurope’s first ‘new world’. As
such, it was regarded as atabula rasafor Euro-
pean efforts at bringing the whole world into
the European world economy (Armitage,
2004). In this respect, North and South
America parted company over how this was
done. If from 1492 to 1776 the North was
increasingly dominated by anempirein as-
cendancy, the British, the South was subject
to two empires, those of Spain and Portugal,
in long-term decay. By the late eighteenth
century, local settler elites in both parts were
in revolt against distant rule. As a result
of their relative success, they were able by
the early nineteenth century to imagine an
America autonomous of Europe in which
their ‘political independence was accompan-
ied by a symbolic independence in the geopol-
itical imagination’ (Mignolo, 2000, p. 135). If
on the US side this led to the Monroe Doc-
trine of ‘America for the Americans’, on the
southern side it led to a developing sense of a
‘Latin America’ increasingly dominated by its
northern neighbour, particularly as the USA
emerged as a global power towards the cen-
tury’s end. The struggle to expropriate or
qualify the labels ‘America’ and ‘American’,
therefore, cannot be separated from the
wider political conflict over the geopolitical
consequences for the whole world of the dis-
covery and subsequent rising significance of
the ‘Americas’. jaSuggested reading
Agnew (2003); Burke (1995); Pagden (1993).American empire As an informal form of
imperial rule mediated by market mechanisms
as much as by military might, Americanem-
pirehas traditionally proved to be an elusive
object of analysis and critique (but see
Williams, 1980). In the context of the Iraq
war this elusiveness has declined, afflicted by
the spectacle of US dominance and the pro-
tests ranged against it (RETORT, 2005). In
the media, liberal apologists joined conserva-
tives in promoting the Iraq adventure expli-
citly as a way of expanding American empire
(e.g. Boot, 2003; Ignatieff, 2003), and, in the
streets, amongst the millions marching against
the war in 2003, many held placards that just
as explicitly decried the violence and hubris of
empire. However, as the playwright Harold
Pinter reminded audiences when he received
his Nobel Prize in 2005, the norm has more
generally been silence on the topic. ‘The
crimes of the United States have been system-
atic, constant, vicious, remorseless,’ he com-
plained, ‘but very few people have actually
talked about them’ (Pinter, 2005). One ex-
planation for this silence is that in political
discoursetwo kinds of ‘exceptionalism’ con-
tinually conspire to make talk of American
empire somehow seem inappropriate. On the
one hand, there is the exceptionalism of im-
perial denial that developed out of the anti-
imperial origins of Americancapitalismand
the Jeffersonian idea of the USA as an ‘empire
of liberty’. Having started with the national
origin stories about independence from imper-
ial rule, this is the popular discourse that ex-
tends today to arguments that American
dominance in themiddle eastis exceptional
in its emphasis on freedom, free enterprise and
liberal rights. On the other hand, there is the
illiberal connotation that makes exceptions in
the name of American ‘leadership’ or ‘sover-
eignty’: a discourse that argues that unique
global circumstances require the USA to
make exceptions and break global rules (such
as the Geneva Conventions) in order to main-
tain global order. There is a wealth of scholar-
ship addressing how the contradiction
between these two discourses exposes the ex-
clusions and obscured authoritarian underpin-
nings of liberal universalism (Cooper, 2004;
Lott, 2006; Singh, 2006). By also mapping
the geographies of dominance that are at
once concealed and enabled by the appeals to
exceptionalism,critical human geography
has simultaneously sought to make American
empire itself less obscure (see El Fisgo ́n, 2004).
Challenging the liberal capitalist dissem-
bling of empire, Neil Smith has underlinedGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_A Final Proof page 25 31.3.2009 9:44pmAMERICAN EMPIRE